Everyone desires excellence. We desire goodness itself. And we know it is good to experience excellence in marriage, work, and life. Another way to put it is that our hearts, as Augustine says, remain restless until they find rest in what is good.
Christians have defined that “good” as God (Mark 10:18), yet this affirmation does not gainsay the universal recognition that nobody with a healthy mind would desire evil for themselves; everyone believes safety, health, sleep, success, and other like things are good.
This basic idea, to my mind, helps to explain the good news of the gospel in ways that profoundly shape our day-to-day lives.
Repentance
When Matthew summarized Jesus’s preaching, he cites these words of Jesus: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt. 4:17). Here, repentance points to a lifelong turning to God as one enters the kingdom of heaven.
And that lifelong turning, repentance, finds its basic content in the Sermon on the Mount. Certainly, this Sermon is not all that repentance means; but it is the archway into the narrow way of Jesus (Matt. 7:13–14), that way to Life and Joy forevermore (Ps. 16:11).
Between us and this way lies sin, death, and corruption. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus defeat these debilitating powers, so that we might die to sin and rise to newness of life (Rom. 6:1–11). In this new life, we are given the gift of repentance (Acts 5:31; 11:18; 2 Tim. 2:25). And it is a gift.
Repentance is both something granted to us and something we do, much like faith or baptism. This is because God’s gifts are never contrary to our will; in fact, he gives us precisely what we desire in our innermost selves (Ps. 37:4). Yet that desire is blunted by sin, death, and corruption. As Jesus abolishes all three, we can be free to experience goodness. The LORD, says David, “fulfills the desire of those who fear him” (Ps. 145:19).
And so when Jesus promulgates the evangelical law (gospel law) in the Sermon on the Mount, he does not proclaim something against our will, but rather to satisfy our desires. That is why he opens the sermon with the Beatitudes. The word Beatitude derives from the Latin beatus, and it translates the Greek word makarios. Rather than describing a covenantal blessing (words like eulogeo or brk do this in the Bible), makarios or beatus can describe someone as being in the state of happiness, or of being fortunate.
Beatitudes
That I think is the main force of what Jesus gets at in the Beatitudes. We are happy when we come to the kingdom of heaven. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, Jesus promises, shall be satisfied (Matt. 5:6). And so Jesus will tell us that we can rejoice and be glad, even when persecuted (Matt. 5:12). Why? Because we do not experience fleeting joy or happiness on the way of Jesus. We experience a lasting, settled joy that constitutes an inner power, a joy no one can take from us (John 16:22).
We were made for God, and Jesus brings us back to him along the way, so that we become good trees which produce good fruit in due season (Matt. 7:17–18; Ps. 1:3). And as good trees, we live healthy, whole, and purposive lives.
Truly, God satisfies “the desire of every living thing” (Ps. 145:16). God made us in his image (Gen. 1:26–28), and he reforms us into that same Image (Col. 3:10; Eph. 4:24; 2 Cor. 3:18). And this reformation looks like holiness and righteousness, goodness, because God is Good. We are to be holy as he is holy (Lev. 19:2; 1 Pet. 1:15–16), perfect (as in whole) as he is perfect (Matt. 5:48).
Jesus is the bread of life who gives us water that will satisfy for eternity (John 6:35; 4:14). He thereby brings us into joy forevermore as he satisfies our deepest needs: hunger and thirst. But this hungering and thirsting for bread and water is meant to teach us not to live by bread alone but by every word of God (Matt. 4:4). For here, we find lasting joy, and our deepest longings satisfied: “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Ps. 16:11).
Anthropology
Of God, David says, “earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you” (Ps. 63:1). And his soul longs “to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD” (Ps. 27:4). Here, we begin to see a biblical anthropology that tells us God made us for himself; we as sheep of his pasture are guided to green pastures and living waters where we find satisfaction (Ps. 23:2; Rev. 7:17).
When Jesus tells us to repent, he tells us to turn to capital-g Goodness, to life everlasting, to happiness, and joy that cannot be shaken. The commands of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount are not burdens but freedom itself; the soul who sins is a slave to sin (John 8:34); but the soul who does righteousness is free, free to perfect that longing of the soul for goodness, which we find in God and his good gifts.
Jesus wants us to be happy, joyous, and flourishing. That’s why he says so! His laws are not burdensome (1 John 5:3). They are light, freeing, and life-giving (Matt. 11:30). The Way of Jesus is a way of peace and joy and love.
Repentance is a gift that we do, and it is a gift that keeps on giving as we turn to God forever, finding deeper rivers of joy as we swim in the happiness of soul that only he can give.
“And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price” (Rev. 22:17).
Further Resources
Wyatt Graham, “The Sermon on the Mount as the Archway to the Christian Life“
